1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a print management apparatus, print management system, and print management method, which uses a job ticket for conducting a printing operation.
2. Description of the Background Art
In general, printed products such as brochures are a mixture of color pages and monochrome pages. Such printed products can be printed by a single multicolor-printing printer. As such, a single printer can be used for a printing operation of such printed products having color and monochrome pages.
In commercial printing, printing companies often have monochrome printers that print only monochrome images. Accordingly, to make maximum use of these monochrome-printing-only printers, printing companies usually want to use multicolor-printing printers for printing color pages and monochrome-printing-only printers for printing monochrome pages.
Moreover, commercial printing, companies often conduct large-volume printing operations, in which printing companies may want to print a single printed product using two or more printers to avoid a heavy printing load at any one particular printer. Further, if a single printed product can be printed using two or more printers, total printing time can be shortened.
Also, in commercial printing, printers may be connected to devices or units that conduct post-print processing of the printed products, such as a punch-hole perforating process for perforating printed products with punch-holes, a staple-binding process for binding printed products using staples, and the like. Such a configuration for the entire production process, from printing by a printer to post-printing by a device unit, can be arranged to be conducted consecutively and seamlessly.
Further, with the advancement of network technology in commercial printing, the entire production process can be integrally managed by controlling electronic data transmission/reception between units, which may conduct a pre-printing process (pretreatment process), a printing process, and a post-printing process, for example. In such integrated management systems, operation instructions for the whole production process may be prepared as a job ticket, for which a job definition format (JDF), for example, may be used.
Although efficient, such integrated printing has drawbacks. For example, if one printed product is printed by two or more printers, the final product may show some variation from page to page in the way they are printed or processed, due to differences in settings between the two or more printers.
Usually, a client designates various printing conditions when placing a print order with a printing company. However, because the client assumes that the printing company may use a single printer and device unit for printing, the client may not designate some printing conditions and post-printing conditions, such as the positions of the punch-holes. If the printing company uses different punch-hole perforating device units having different settings, a single finished product may be composed of a mixture of pages having different punch-hole positions.
JP-2007-156671-A discloses one method to cope with such inconvenience when two or more printers are used for printing when the printers are switched part of the way through the printing. In JP-2007-156671-A, a first printer having first device information can be switched to a second printer having second device information during a printing operation to prevent differences in the finished product due to differences in device information between the first and second printers.
In the method of JP-2007-156671-A, before starting a printing operation with the second printer, the JDF is re-edited based on the second device information of the second printer so that differences in the finished product due to differences in device information between first and second printers can be prevented.
However, the method of JP-2007-156671-A contemplates switching printers if an error or malfunction occurs. Accordingly, such method is ineffective for printing print products having a mixture of color and monochrome pages because it may be necessary to switch printers several times. As such, printed products composed of a mixture of color and monochrome pages may not be effectively printed by the method of JP-2007-156671-A.